Batteries can be used for a variety of applications. The design of such batteries is also applicable to cases in which the battery is not the only power supply in the system, and additional power is provided by a fuel cell, other battery, IC engine or other combustion device, capacitor, solar cell, etc.
Solid state cells are generally in the experimental state, have been difficult to make, and have not been successfully produced in large scale. Effective design and production of solid state cells has not been achieved due to limitations in cell structures and manufacturing techniques.
Solid state batteries have been proven to have several advantages over conventional batteries using liquid electrolytes in lab settings; safety being the foremost one. A solid state battery is intrinsically more stable than liquid electrolyte cells since it does not contain a liquid that can cause an undesirable reaction, resulting in thermal runaway, and potentially an explosion in the worst case scenario.
Despite of the outstanding properties of solid state batteries, there are many challenges to address in the future to make this type of battery available in the market. Termination and packaging of solid state batteries needs to be improved to exploit their compactness and high energy density. Developing low cost techniques for large area and fast film deposition need to be developed to make solid state batteries useful in a variety of applications such as consumer electronics or RFID, etc. Furthermore, better techniques to handle very thin layers of brittle material need to be developed to allow optimization of solid state batteries. Particularly, optimization of those techniques and equipment capable of assembling or manufacturing large numbers of these thin layers are needed.